The Portable Career Audit

Career leverage is what remains when the badge stops working: the evidence, positioning, relationships, and options that travel with you. Most high performers never measure it, until a reorg, a leadership change, or a layoff measures it for them.

Score each question: 2 = solidly yes, 1 = partially, 0 = no. Be honest; nobody sees this but you.

Evidence: does proof of your work exist outside internal systems?

• 1. Could you name, today, the ten highest-value problems you have solved, with outcomes and numbers, without logging into your employer’s tools?
• 2. Does documentation of your best work exist somewhere you own (a portfolio, case studies, a private evidence bank)?
• 3. Could you explain your value to a stranger without using your company’s name or internal terminology?

Position: does the market know what you are?

• 4. Is there a clear through-line across your career that you could state in one sentence?
• 5. Does your LinkedIn describe the problems you solve, or just the titles you have held?
• 6. Does your title reflect your actual scope, and could you prove the gap if it does not?
• 7. If your role were eliminated tomorrow, do you know what you would target first, and what an adjacent second lane would be?

Visibility: do the right people know it?

• 8. Do people outside your current company associate you with a specific kind of problem?
• 9. In the last 90 days, has anyone outside your employer seen evidence of your thinking: a post, a talk, a panel, a substantive conversation?
• 10. Would a recruiter searching for someone at your level, in your specialty, plausibly find you?

Relationships: who would pick up the phone?

• 11. Could you list 30 people who have seen your work firsthand and would take your call this month?
• 12. Have you talked to any of them in the last quarter without needing something?
• 13. Do you know 3 people who have already made the move you might want to make: leadership, pivot, consulting, advisory?

Options: is there more than one door?

• 14. If you wanted or needed to leave in 90 days, do you have more than one viable path? Not hypothetically, but with a first step you could name.
• 15. Could any part of your expertise earn money independently of an employer (consulting, advising, fractional work), and have you ever scoped what that offer would be?

Reading your score

24–30: Portable. Your leverage exists. The work now is maintenance: keep the evidence current, the relationships warm, and the options real before you need them.

15–23: Employer-dependent. Your value is real, but too much of it is stored inside one company’s walls. The highest-return move is building your evidence bank and external visibility now, while you are employed and unpressured, not after a disruption prices it for you.

0–14: Exposed. This is not a verdict on your ability; high performers score here constantly, precisely because they were heads-down delivering. It means one decision you do not control could send you to the market with your strongest work invisible. Start with Evidence. Everything else builds on it.

Want this level of thinking applied to your specific career, decisions, and evidence? That is exactly what the private work is for.

See how we work together →